Ella Baker
FameRank: 6

"Ella Josephine Baker" was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned over five decades. She worked alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr./Martin Luther King, Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Robert Parris Moses/Bob Moses. She was a critic of Non-governmental organization/professionalized, cult of personality/charismatic leadership and a promoter of grassroots organizing and radical democracy. She has been called "One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–68)/civil rights movement."

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The stuggle is eternal. The tribe increase. Somebody else carries on.

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I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. . .

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There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.

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In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed... It means facing a system that does not lend its self to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.

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Give light and people will find the way.

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One of the things that has to be faced is the process of waiting to change the system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.

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